HIMSS EHR Association Offers HIE Strategy, World…Yawns?

In my naivete, I thought the following might be a serious milestone, or at least a thought-provoking read.  Consider the serious tone of this announcement:

The HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association (EHR Association), a collaboration of 46 EHR supplier companies, announced today the availability of a major new white paper “Supporting a Robust Health Information Exchange Strategy with a Pragmatic Transport Framework”.  The focused recommendations in the white paper, aimed at key health IT stakeholders, are based on proven standards and successful health information exchange (HIE) implementations around the world.

Then I took a few spoonfuls of my cereal, drank some coffee and my mind woke up. Oh yes, right, an announcement and a white paper will power the languishing HIE market into action. Right, and President Obama will show up next week and do my laundry.

Honestly, folks, I’m an analyst with health IT background, not a developer or CIO type — so I’m not qualified to say exactly what technologies will work. But I do know posturing when I see it, and that HIMSS press release is rife with quasi-visionary statements. More pointedly, the paper does little more than point to some successful projects and say “See, aren’t they great?”

In any event, I have little confidence in any announcement that proposes to offer the solution, or even the outline of the solution, to any of life’s big problems:  say, the national debt, the struggle for world peace or linking a bunch of fragmented, siloed regional clinical data-sharing projects into a workable whole.

Lest you think I’m a lone cynic, ponder this reaction from an EMR industry insider who preferred to remain anonymous:

“Just about all of this white paper beyond the Direct Project stage is pure B.S. Bits and pieces can be demonstrated at Connectathons, etc. but it will be impossible in the real world to have generalized usefulness with all this overly complicated garbage. It is almost as if the EHRA is conspiring to thwart real interoperability progress.

Look for the push methodologies/capabilities arising out of the initial Direct Project pilots to expand to provide the functionalities this report claims are not possible. This will happen and just supersede all this proposed nonsense because it will simply, incrementally work.”

Now *that* analysis makes tremendous sense to me. If The Direct Project — or other efforts to follow — can foster the growth of sensible data-sharing schemes, we might just get our national HIE. If not, well, don’t look to announcements like these for answers.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

4 Comments

  • I wish that the announcement would have matched the headline. Here’s the headline, “Electronic Health Records Developers Agree on Standards.” Then, you read the press release and they’ve basically released a whitepaper.

    So, I like you was quite disappointed. A white paper doesn’t quite mean that a standard has been agreed to. Plus, as I recall, Epic is not a member of EHRA. So, without them on board, that’s not much agreement on the standard. Throw Kaiser in there too (at least I don’t think there in there either).

  • I was just told that Epic is a part of EHRA. I wonder their feelings about this whitepaper since I guess it will have their name on it too.

  • I found this to be a very interesting post. I would have to agree with the anonymous poster and author of the post. I believe that solutions to national HIE are going to require more than an outline for solutions. I also agree with John’s post, “a white paper doesn’t quite mean that a standard has been agreed to.” Thank you for sharing- Great, meaningful content!

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